Dead Animals

This book will captivate you with its gorgeous cover (hello pink + green, millennial dream) and intriguing title. Once you start, you won't be able to put it down, Get ready to be creeped out! For fans of Rouge and Natural Beauty.

Anna Burnett is an engaging narrator who brought the unnamed narrator to life and I would happily listen to an audiobook narrated by Anna in the future.

Thanks to Hodder & Stoughton Audio, Sceptre + NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to this audiobook before it's released. Dead Animals is out on 11th April 2024 💖💚 #DeadAnimals #NetGalley

Where do I start?
Dead Animals looks pretty mundane with its pretty coloured cover and interesting title but once you get started, you will not be able to stop.
The writing is so simple, yet so gripping and the suspense and intrigue that builds leaves your skin crawling.
Stuckes has written an incredible short horror and I wish I could read it again for the first time. The violence of the novel is balanced with wit and an almost self-conscious innocence that drawers you in and keeps you hooked.

The narrator was also a great fit, such a calming voice narrating such eery horror!

Thank you to Hodder & Stoughton and Netgalley for the audio ARC

This is a creepy and downright strange story that explores themes of trauma of queer romance in the most twisted way. This book will hold you in a lingering feeling of dread throughout; you'll wonder where this story is going. You'll wonder if, perhaps, this story follows an unreliable narrator. This book will confuse you, and you won't know what to think of it as you read it, but it will hold you. It'll hold your attention in the most spine tingling way,

The story follows a young waitress holding heavy baggage and trauma. Living her life in a tiny little bedsit, you truly feel the isolation of this character and grow to love and sympathise with her.

The story takes a turn when she meets a mysterious woman named Helene. Helene is gorgeous (you can feel her aura through Stuckes' beautiful writing) and you can understand why our narrator is so enticed by her. But there's a dark side of Helene which we begin to uncover the very day they meet. There's something not quite right about her; there's a secrecy in the weight of her words. You'll wonder what the deal is with Helene as you learn more and more about here, with every piece of information about her disturbing you more and more, but you won't be able to stop reading. This book fully invests you in their relationship, and though it is twisted and somewhat macabre, you'll be desperate to discover more.

This is a short but disturbing story, and you'll feel a tad numb once it finishes. It'll all end too soon, and it'll take you a while to understand the story you just read. Hours after finishing, you'll put two pieces of the puzzle together; you'll remember something from the early half of the book which appears far more disturbing now in retrospect. This story will linger with you like the sorrow and trauma that lingers with the main character. And that's a good thing; it just proves the power of Stuckes' delicious writing.

The audiobook narrator is perfect for the main character, and her performance of this book really enhances the experience of the story. She really embodies the characters, sprinkling the perfect amount of emotion and energy into each line, but not too much. She allows you to imagine the story yourself, her performance guiding your imagination, allowing you to simply enjoy picturing the scene,

Thank you to Hodder & Stoughton and Sceptre for providing an audiobook and eBook via NetGalley

Initially drawn in by the captivating cover, a delightful mix of pink and green, I'm confident this book will rank among my top reads of 2024. The depiction of trauma, inner turmoil, and grief after experiencing a sexual assault is masterfully written, allowing me to truly feel the main character's pain. Without hesitation, I'll be purchasing this book as soon as it's available.


It's giving Eileen vibes. The Moshfegh girlies will connect with this book.

The eye catching cover caught my attention, the synopsis drew me in and the narrator of the audiobook (Anna Burnett) reading the brilliant book Dead Animals had me completely captivated. This short novel, is very unique, unlike any other book I have ever listened to, it is a story so well told. It starts with the protagonist, a young woman, meeting another woman, Hélène, who has also has experience of the man who sexually assaulted her. The quickly form an unlikely friendship. This is story of the woman and Hélène. It is very interesting, amusing at times and also dark and brutal.
The book works remarkably well as an audiobook. I really enjoyed listening to it, and will certainly look for at her books by this narrator as well as other books by the author, Phoebe Stuckes.
Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for an audiobook version of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This is a deliciously creepy and enigmatic story that merges sexual trauma with something spine-tinglingly weird - I loved the way the two strands are held together via the concept of haunting.

Set against a young woman's alienated malaise compounded by a precarious existence as a zero hours waitress and living in a tiny bedsit, this feels absolutely contemporary. I seem to have read a handful of books recently that deal with the individual elements: non-consent, sexual violence, female contemporary alienation, psychological illness manifesting in the body, coercive relationships, female rage - and this one manages to give them all a shake-up and then pull them back together in a single narrative.

The 'light-hearted' bullying endured by our vegetarian narrator in the upmarket offal restaurant where she works is part of the atmosphere, as are the classic 'haunted' signs: shadows in the mirror, light bulbs popping, strange noises - and the way they indicate psychic stress as well as a possible strange kind of agency. And the characterisation of Helena, a new friend, lover and would-be saviour is genius.

I've seen reservations about the writing style but listening to this in audio worked superbly for me: Anna Burnett's muted voice conveys exactly the right deadened/dead pan voice I needed from this narrator without making the listening itself dull. The contrast between the happenings described by the narrator and the matter of fact way she tells them is exactly the space I needed for this book to work - and I had genuine shivers at various points!

Keeping the story compact and short works well as I read it in pretty much one sitting allowing all the threads to come together. Wonderfully poised between classic spookiness and the modern horrors of precarious lives, sexual violence, power differentials and toxicity, this was absolutely the right book at the right time for me.

This kept me intrigued until the end. It is the story of a young woman living alone in London. She is a waitress struggling to make ends meet and also struggling psychologically. Until she meets the pretty and rich Helene, who is clearly manipulating her and plotting something sinister.

I like it when one single sentence colours the entire book and this is what happens here when Helene makes a certain remark to the main character.

There is tension and an eerie atmosphere that reminded me somewhat of Ottessa Moshfegh, but also Sisters by Daisy Johnson.

Thanks to Netgalley for the audio-ARC - the narrator fit the story perfectly!

> ARC review: Thank you to Hodder & Stoughton and Netgalley for the audio advanced copy.

Dead Animals is the story of a woman that wakes up after a night at a party with very few memories and a lot of bruises on her body. We follow her journey as she remembers little by little the abuse she went through at the hands of a man.

She meets the mysterious Helene who suffered something similar through her relationship with the same man our main character met at the party.

Through the entire story, the atmosphere is quite dark as we follow the main character's thoughts. She tries to navigate her life and her new relationship with Helene as they both deal with anger from the violence the man brought upon them. Helene clearly seeks revenge, while the main character is pledged by nightmares and fear.

As this book is written in the first person, the narrator in the audiobook does a fantastic job at making the main character feel alive. Which also made it hard to pause as I wanted to know the development of this story very badly.